We received the following press release from Southpeak that says Reality Pump&#39;s Two Worlds is (or was) ahead of schedule and with some added development time the multiplayer component has been expanded to "massively multiplayer":

Quote:

TWO WORLDS ONLINE TO BE MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER
Thousands Can Explore and Adventure Together Online In SouthPeak Game’s Upcoming Open-Ended Role-Playing Title
GRAPEVINE, TX &ndash; February 2, 2007 &ndash; SouthPeak. Games, a leading independent videogame publisher, is thrilled to announce that Two Worlds, its massive, open-ended role-playing game to be released this spring for the PC and Xbox 360&trade; video game and entertainment system from Microsoft, is having its online component greatly expanded. Whereas formerly Two Worlds was to allow up to eight players to adventure together online, the game will now support thousands of players online at one time.
“Reality Pump was in the fortunate position of being both ahead of schedule and given some extra development time, so they could truly bring out the full potential of Two Worlds,” said Katie Morgan, Executive Vice President of SouthPeak Games. “In our opinion, the best things in life are those that are shared with friends, and the more friends the better!”
Online players of Two Worlds will now be able to join parties that are competing against others to solve quests, battle other players in the arena to gain glory, form armies to storm enemy cities, arrange and compete in horse races, or simply socialize in a medieval pub. Like the single-player experience, the massively multiplayer online component of Two Worlds will offer an opportunity for the players to affect and change the lands they live in.

Meanwhile, Blue&#39;s has a slightly different announcement from Zuzzex that provides a little more insight:

Quote:

Karlsruhe, 2nd February 2007 &ndash; the good things in life are best shared with friends! The “Two Worlds” developers have also taken this to heart - and added a fantastically varied MMORPG mode to their new game! Players can now oppose one another or join forces in Antaloor as Arena or RPG characters!

Let off steam in the Arena with exciting head-to-head battles - and remember it&#39;s only your skill that counts here - Arena characters all have the same status!

For all you hard-bitten RPG fans out there, the multiplayer game is the real thing! Want to establish your own individual character? "Two Worlds" has it all! The main jump-off point for role-playing gamers are the towns &ndash; they serve as both meeting places and platforms for starting various quests. In typical MMORPG style, this is where players meet for the first time, hold get-togethers in their favorite bars or simply look around for new challenges. You can also join Clans or found new ones. When a clan has got together, an adventure then begins that is tailored to the strengths of the group, which can be up to eight players in number. The game character develops in a completely free manner (no level limits) and can collect equipment and experience points too. You have traditional, classic adventures available - and also novel challenges, like horse racing! You can of course save your game character and equipment on the server - and you can continue his development whenever you’re ready… or you can earn yourself some money, by selling off special artifacts and weapons in the towns.

Character creation is based on various races and classes which will be introduced soon. These figures all have their own basic characteristics - and of course you can fully develop these during the course of the game! You can mold all the optical characteristics of your character as well, creating your own private heroes via a special interface! Color of eyes, breadth of chest, length of arms and legs…almost anything you can think of!

Souhtpeak later sent clarification that this is for the PC version only and "No details on the MMO gameplay for the Xbox 360 version are available".More information.

I'm only interested in the SP game. It will be very interesting to see if "ahead of schedule" means that aspect will be highly polished or the resources were diverted into a MMO mode (with a fair chance that will be broken).

Burress

February 2nd, 2007 22:35

Souhtpeak later sent clarification that this is for the PC version only and "

Does that mean the XBox 360 version will be single player only or sp and 8 party maximum only? Is that statement part of the article?

I'm only interested in the SP game. It will be very interesting to see if "ahead of schedule" means that aspect will be highly polished or the resources were diverted into a MMO mode (with a fair chance that will be broken).

My guess would be that it is or was the multiplayer dev team only who were running ahead of schedule and ended up with some time left to buff up the multiplayer mode(s) some more.

I don't think and would not expect that any of this will have any effect on the single player aspect of the game which is most likely done by a different team that might just as well be lagging behind their own schedule.

And -no- before someone makes the suggestion that they should have just diverted resources from multiplayer to single player, I don't think you can do it just like that.
Integrating "new" people (which the MP folks -despite some familiarity with the engine- would effectively be in regards to the SP aspect of the game) into an existing rather massive project takes a lot of time and poses a significant risk to the entire project.
That's why it would seem to me that the decision to let them flesh out the MP aspect makes sense.

PatrickWeekes

February 2nd, 2007 23:10

Quote:

Originally Posted by Moriendor
(Post 18069)

And -no- before someone makes the suggestion that they should have just diverted resources from multiplayer to single player, I don't think you can do it just like that.
Integrating "new" people (which the MP folks -despite some familiarity with the engine- would effectively be in regards to the SP aspect of the game) into an existing rather massive project takes a lot of time and poses a significant risk to the entire project.
That's why it would seem to me that the decision to let them flesh out the MP aspect makes sense.

Agreed. From the very little that I understand it, doing that is a bit like saying, "Hey, instead of baking this pie at 300 degrees for an hour, I'm going to bake it at 900 degrees for just twenty minutes!" In some game areas, throwing more resources at the problem will not cause it to go faster or better.

It'll be interesting to see what effect "MMO" versus "Multi" has on the Single-player experience, though. It's not as large as the difference between "multi" and "single-player only", but it's still sizeable, and does (I believe) some interesting stuff to decisions like how many resources you can have on-screen and how much combat data you can expect to send across the network at any given time.

(Note: If I do have a game developer hat, and I don't know that I do, I'm not wearing it right now. This is just me looking at it as a fan.)

txa1265

February 2nd, 2007 23:24

Quote:

Originally Posted by Moriendor
(Post 18069)

And -no- before someone makes the suggestion that they should have just diverted resources from multiplayer to single player, I don't think you can do it just like that.

Hehe … good point, and very true. My company re-org'd a few years back and they wanted to make fast-moving product teams. The goal was to have members as 'interchangeable cogs', whether they were research chemists, chemical engineers, or analytical chemists (thankfully as a physicist I was left out of that braindead experiment). They found quickly that it was really stupid. Devs having separate SP and MP efforts is very common and for good reason - they require different specializations.

doctor_kaz

February 2nd, 2007 23:51

Cross another game off of the "must buy" list.

chamr

February 3rd, 2007 00:03

It's even more than just a specialization issue. Being a software development project manager, I bump up against this problem every now and then, usually in the form of an MBA type. I like to say that software development is not ditch digging. You can't throw more ditch diggers in there and get the ditch done faster. Even if they have the exact same skills, there is a lot to catch up on from how the piece they've been assigned fits into the whole puzzle all the way up to understanding the puzzle as a whole. As Moriender states, it's a risk to a SD project to "crash the tasks", in PM-speak, and it comes without a guarantee of positive returns. Can be done, but is very, very tricky to pull off.

Corwin

February 3rd, 2007 02:25

I'll still probably get the game, but like Dhruin, for the SP component only!! However, latest checking here tells me it won't be released in this country, so I'll have to order it OS as usual!!

ToddMcF2002

February 3rd, 2007 02:32

Way too many promises and features.

I smell vaporware.

Decado

February 3rd, 2007 02:34

Generally expect it to be a mediocre (at best) all around. I don't think most developers have the talent or resources to make a quality single player RPG, these days. Throw in extensive multiplayer and it seems pretty dodgey, particularly coming from a RTS developer.

Lucky Day

February 3rd, 2007 02:44

From my experience w/ building NWN MP I'm wondering what this really means?

Does thousands of players mean there will be a single (set of) company supported servers that players will log into, like as set of rooms, or will players set up their own servers.

Tweaking it from 8 to 1000's must have been very simple for them for a large game like this at this stage. Otherwise it would be a nuts idea and I don't blame some of you for being concerned.

The three types of game design for RPG's are SP, MP Single-Party, and MP Multi-Party which is the type you'd need for PW's.

They design very differently. IE. A quest log entry would be given to a Single Player only without concern for a Party in SP. You wouldn't need to look for anyone in the group. Or you would gave it to the Player as if he were a group of one.

In Single Party that same quest would go to the entire group because you have to account for everyone. An individual would get it regardless because its based on Party Quests which everyone should be assumed at the same point.

Multi-Party MP must revert back to the individual players in the party or it just gets screwed up. Converting from Single-Party MP to Multi-Party MP is what concerns me if that is how it was designed.

Now, they are saying the individuals must compete for the same quests in such a state. This tells you something. Probably it was designed for Single-Party. And so quite possibly multiple parties sound like they can break each others quests.

I'm not overly worried about this and I like the idea of MP in such a large world. I would have played Morrowind a lot longer if it Multiplayer for example. I mean..it just got boring.

Acleacius

February 3rd, 2007 05:56

Moriendor
"My guess would be that it is or was the multiplayer dev team"
Ahh that's something of a relief to know they proabably have two teams, so I won't write it off atm, thanks. :)

Yes count me in the SP only for the most part, now if they have cooked up some kickass Coop like NWN's series or the dreded DL (could have been), then I may jump in and give it a try.
It seems to me they are actually tryiing to accoplish something similar to Guild Wars, with this added MMOG mode (?).
This has some massive potienal but as so many others in this thread have voiced scepticism, I agree.
This is a hell of a lot to accomplish, as a matter of fact I can't recall ever seeing all this accomplished before, so I wish them luck cause who wouldn't want another good RPG to play. ;)

Dhruin

February 3rd, 2007 14:21

We'll see. How many multiplayer RPGs have delivered a polished MP experience out of the box? How many successfully changed the design late in development to expand the multiplayer function so dramatically? How many did that and delivered an Oblivion-like gameworld size filled with good content and mounted combat? Assuming a second team (do they have a second team?), did they create an entirely independent massive experience or was the SP quest structure modified to accomodate thousands of players? Even if there is a hypothetical second dev team, did the guys working on the UI get to polish the basic interfaces or did they move on to creating an appropriate MMO UI?

I wish them luck. They'll need it.

zakhal

February 3rd, 2007 17:04

MM element has a bad tendency to ruin the roleplay in roleplaying game. For single player rpg its like poison. I dont see how this can work. They should just keep them seperated.

The last thing I want is som 12-year old kids running around naked shouting dirty words in my roleplaying game when Im trying to immerse myself in to the story.

Good rpg is like reading a fantasy book. Its quite hard to read it if strangers from the real word come to disturb you all the time. If I want to socialice I want to do it while not trying to read a book.

Stormwaltz

February 3rd, 2007 20:39

As someone who shipped three MMORPG titles, allow me to assure you all that making an MMORPG balanced and cheat-free is the easiest job in the world, and I have every confidence that Two Worlds can accomplish this in the extra couple of months they had at the end of their schedule.

…

What?

Moriendor

February 3rd, 2007 20:52

Quote:

Originally Posted by Stormwaltz
(Post 18221)

As someone who shipped three MMORPG titles, allow me to assure you all that making an MMORPG balanced and cheat-free is the easiest job in the world, and I have every confidence that Two Worlds can accomplish this in the extra couple of months they had at the end of their schedule.

…

What?

Good one :biggrin: . But in reality I believe that they have made this decision months/years ago already. If you look at the news history of Two Worlds then you can see that they have revealed bits of info about the game on every Friday for the past 3 weeks (plus they've released some renders in early January). On January 19, they revealed some features of the magic system. On January 26 they announced a delay of the game to May. And now this multiplayer announcement on February 2. Sounds like the marketing department is at work here. They've probably worked on those "new" multiplayer features for months already and are just revealing it now for publicity reasons.

Lucky Day

February 3rd, 2007 22:43

Quote:

But in reality I believe that they have made this decision months/years ago already.

I have to agree there. There's no way you can make a major decision like this at the last minute without it being already viable.

But again, I want more details on how this is going to work. Are they going to host servers or are they allowing servers to be localized and give permission for 1000's of players to join.

If the case is the latter you don't have to worry about 12 year olds.

If there's a good editor for this as well this might be a great candidate for PW building as well, so long as you don't have to downlaod some huge file.

Acleacius

February 4th, 2007 01:41

Well at least in the past all MMOG games are played on dev/pub servers, it's rather a defining for the genre, so I am betting this (mode) will also be dev/pub based.
Now I have heard of crack/illegal servers for MMOGs like EQ2 and WoW but know even less about those.

Now in reguards to pre MMOG (mode) info the up 8 people in Coop (iirc) would certinaly be something similar to past allowing people to create their own lan or net Coop game, if they have lan capablity and net ability then certianly seems likey.
Not to mention I never heard of players being forced to play normal Coop games on dev/pub servers, in the past (iirc) players at the very least have had the choice to play Coop on their own servers.

Lucky Day

February 4th, 2007 02:05

Hmm..from now on I'll Say Co-op instead of Single-Party MP. Much simpler.

Typically you call a server hack a "Shard". This is from Ultima Online and the idea that the breakaway servers with different timelines were separate "Shards" from a gem that Mondaine? shattered. When the first servers that were reverse engineered from UO kept the name.

Ultima Online is why people refer to their internet portrait as "Avatars". In single player Ultimas of course you obtain you your Avatar-hood thru the eight virtues. Since it was the player that becomes the Avatar when they made UO naturally every player was an "Avatar". This historicity is lost on most people today.

(I know I used the word wrong. Its just that I like saying "historicity".)

Y'now you are probably right. If they are going to support thousands it would have to be on some uber machine and you don't see that in your typical household. Too bad. I have no interest in playing such a game like this in a massive environment. This isn't Guild Wars after all.